Eddie Northen
Analyst · Jamie Clement of Macquarie. Please go ahead
Thank you, Gary. We had a solid revenue growth that helped with our 41st consecutive quarter of improved earnings results. Even with accelerating BOSS related costs pushed into the first quarter, into this quarter as well, we had a strong 6% net income growth. Many of our operations have gone through a substantial effort during the very busy time of the year in order to get this project finished in August. Each of our service lines showed continued growth and key to the quarter included continued strong residential and termite revenue gain, new international market expansion, strong HomeTeam results and significantly higher year-over-year BOSS expense. Looking at the numbers, the company reported second quarter revenues of $411.1 million, an increase of 4.8% over the prior year’s second quarter revenue of $392.2 million. Good steady growth continued in 2016. For the quarter, income before income taxes increased 6.4% to $76.9 million. Last year, we had a small positive tax adjustment, which didn’t repeat this year. Our foreign taxes were a bit higher than last year due to the growth in our foreign operations. And as a result, net income increased 6% to $47.8 million with earnings per share of 4.8% to $0.22 versus $0.21 per diluted share last year in the second quarter. I will talk in a few minutes about our BOSS results to-date, but first I want to circle back to share some of the tremendous results that HomeTeam continues to produce. As they approach their milestone 1 million Taexx tubes in the wall pest control installations since inception they continued double-digit installation growth. Year-to-date, new installations were up 11.6%. Each install gives us an opportunity for HomeTeam to capture a new recurring pest control customer. Part of the continued overall Rollins termite success can be attributed to the excellent builder pre-treat and recurring termite customers of HomeTeam. This service is offered when HomeTeam works with builders during the new construction phase. Year-to-date, the number of homes receiving this pretreatment service has grown 12%. This installation opens the door for HomeTeam to continue to provide termite protection to that customer on a recurring basis moving forward, plus they enjoy the prospect of a potential pest control customer. Let’s take a look through the revenue by service line. Our total revenue increased to 4.8%, which included a small 0.04% from acquisitions and the remaining 4.4% was from pricing and organic growth. Residential pest control was up a solid 6.7%, commercial pest control up 2.6% and termite up strong 5.2%. During the quarter, we acquired Murray Pest Control in Australia, which made a positive impact on our termite business. And as I mentioned earlier, HomeTeam has been a key to our continued termite gains. As I have mentioned earlier, we have pushed a lot of expense into the first and second quarters to get this rollout wrapped up. But we are very pleased to see improvement that BOSS is producing on a limited basis today. Since the last call, we have added 1,200 new pest control and termite control iPhone equipped technicians to BOSS for a total of over 5300 active users. For those of you that are bit more tech-savvy, BOSS is a greatly improved platform that enables integration and products, which will speed the delivery of future enhancements. Separately from that, we see the business benefits to-date falling into three buckets employee, customer and financial. Starting with employee benefits, millennials to our most season employees love the ease of use and professional presence with the customer by moving from the old CN50 handheld to the new iPhone. The system helps to organize today for the technician and allow the needed changes to the route throughout the day. This is another way that we are creating a better overall job experience for our people. In addition, the system has built in turn-by-turn directions that will populate when the next customer is selected to help with ease and efficiency of navigating the route each day. Also when an employee is in front of the customer, the technician will have visibility to all of the services that are active with that customer. If one of our service technicians are with the customer they can more readily tell what of our other services they should offer, based on that customer’s needs. This will improve our ability to increase share of wallet as well as customer retention. As our war data shows, the more services a customer has, the stickier that customer will be going forward. The customer benefits are a key to the long-term success of the project. Customers now are able to receive an e-mail of an improved service ticket as soon as the service is complete instead of the former paper version. Currently, over 50% of our customers are taking advantage of this feature. Our customer experience will improve with our ability to schedule or reschedule a follow-up appointment in the future. The updates will be sent to technician’s iPhone, in some cases while the customer is still on the line. In the past, it was a very manual process and those same requests were received at our branch locations where the administrative group would have to call or text the technician to see how their day looked and then explain the change needed. This new scheduling process is much more customer friendly. One of the many financial benefits is the real-time thinking of customer service tickets and billing. This saves time from our administrative ranks no longer needing to post these services and will speed up the billing and collection cycle between one and two days. Beginning in Q3, our implementation in handheld expense for new iPhone kits were dropped dramatically. By Q4, these conversion costs will be completely eliminated. As we noted before, we are still assessing how we will address implementation of the other independent brands with this technology and we will keep you posted. With more regions now deployed, over the 12-month comparison period, we continue to see improvements in administrative overtime, customer retention both pest control and termite as well as reductions in pest control bad debt as the administrative groups are more able to concentrate on this important area of cash flow. We will continue to assess and monitor these and other areas of benefits as we continue down the maturity path of the system. In total, gross margin for the quarter improved to 52.3% versus 51.5% in the prior year. The margin for the quarter benefited from lower personnel related expense as group insurance claims were down year-over-year, lower fleet costs due to a decrease in fuel prices and service salaries as a percent of revenue with the better employee productivity. Depreciation and amortization expense for the second quarter increased 7.1% totaling $12.4 million. Depreciation was $5.9 million, increasing $1.16 million with most of that increase related to our BOSS system. Amortization was $6.4 million, which increased $57,000 due to the addition of Critter Control customer contracts that will be amortized over 7 years. Sales, general and administrative expenses for the quarter increased $7.9 million or 6.7%, but deteriorated slightly to last year at 30.8% of revenues. Increases were in the areas of professional services, mostly due to the Safeguard acquisition and higher sales salaries needed for the increased demand and increased administrative salaries due to the accelerated BOSS implementation. As for our cash position, for the first six months ended June 30, 2016, we spent almost $36 million on our 21 acquisitions and paid out $43.7 million in dividends, which is up 25% over last year. We were active with share repurchase in the open market, purchasing a total of 419,329 shares for a total of $11,158,491. We had $19.9 million of CapEx and ended with $126 million in cash, up 15.3% from last year. Last night, the Board of Directors declared a regular cash dividend of $0.10 per share that will be paid on September 9, 2016 to the stockholders of record at the close of business August 10, 2016. This marks the 14th consecutive year the Board has increased our dividend by a minimum of 12% or greater. We look forward to finishing the BOSS project and to begin realizing the benefits of our investments. For our analysts and the investment community, I hope that you will mark September 20 on your calendar for our first Rollins Investor Analyst Day in New York City. I look forward to the opportunity for you to meet our top executives and learn more about our businesses. I will now turn the call back over to Gary.